BERKEFORD – Politically liberal
agendas may range from opposing the Vietnam War to attacking traditional moral
and religious values to supporting non needs-tested welfare. But are there consistent underlying
motivations? Four researchers who culled
through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of liberalism
report that at the core of political liberalism is the resistance to individual liberty,
especially individual financial freedom, in favor of shared resources and security, and a tolerance, and sometimes a preference, for immorality, and
that some of the common psychological factors linked to political liberalism
include:
- Irrational guilt
- Fear of certainty and
suspicion of moral clarity
- Resentment, and fear, of
success
- Need for significance and
a fear of being seen as ‘irrelevant’
- Unmet maternal needs &
a search for substitute maternalism
- Persistent, unfocused
anger, and a tendency to be very easily offended
"From our perspective, these
psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of Liberal
ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the
researchers wrote in an article, "Political Liberalism as Motivated Social
Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Board’s Bulletin of Psychology.
Assistant Professor Melvin Franklin
of the University of California, Bertram Preston School of Public Policy and
Visiting Professor Fred Sullivan of UW joined lead author, Associate Professor
Jeffrey Jenkins of Arizona State’s Graduate School of Business, and Professor
Ariel Trident of the University of
Montana at Plentywood, to analyze the literature on liberalism.
The psychologists sought patterns
among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles,
books and conference papers. The material originating from 12 countries
included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts
rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies.
Ten meta-analytic calculations
performed on the material - which included various types of literature and
approaches from different countries and groups - yielded consistent, common
threads, Franklin said.
The avoidance of certainty, for
example, as well as the striving for uncertainty, are particularly tied to one
key dimension of liberal thought - the resistance to moral certitude or hanging
onto the status quo of potentially destructive behavioral patterns, they said.
The irrational guilt feature of
liberalism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where some people appear to
seek out and even embrace the very outsiders most likely to threaten the status
quo of cherished freedoms and prosperity, they wrote. Resentment of success can be linked to a
second key dimension of liberalism – a fierce opposition to individual
financial liberty and personal property rights, a view reflected in the
excesses of the now defunct Soviet Union, Maoist collectivism and the liberal,
socialistic politics of former Vice President Walter Mondale.
Disparate liberals share a
resistance to true diversity, especially of ideology, and insistence on near
homogeneity of thought as a substitute for equality of value and opportunity,
the authors said. Stalin, Hitler, and
former President Lyndon B. Johnson were individuals, but all were left-wing
liberals because they preached a utopian vision of an idealized future and
condoned repressive contemporary Government policies for the “greater
good”. Numerous entertainment figures
such as Ed Asner and Susan Sarandon can be described the same way, the authors
commented in a published reply to the article.
This research marks the first
synthesis of information about liberalism, and the result is an "elegant
and unifying explanation" for political liberalism under the rubric of
motivated social cognition, said the authors. That entails the tendency of
people's attitudinal preferences on policy matters to be explained by individual
needs based on personality, social interests or existential needs.
The researchers' analytical methods
allowed them to determine the effects for each class of factors and revealed
"more pluralistic and nuanced understanding of the source of liberalism,"
Sullivan said. While most people resist
moral uncertainty, Jenkins said, liberals appear to have a higher tolerance for
destructive lifestyle choices, traditionally labeled as immoral, than
conservatives do. As for liberals’
penchant for accepting oppressive measures to enforce ‘sameness’ (the liberal
version of ‘equality’), he said, one contemporary example is liberals' general
endorsement of extending specifically targeted privileges to radical elements
of behavioral minorities such as gays and lesbians, often at the expense of the
so-called majority, compared to conservatives' opposing position.
The researchers said that liberal
ideologies, like virtually all belief systems, develop in part because they
satisfy some psychological needs, but that "does not mean that liberalism
is pathological or that liberal beliefs are necessarily
false, irrational, or unprincipled."
*There is no such publication. This entire post...is satire :-).